Some things that wander through the mind

I have a friend who hates -- absolutely loathes -- all the bells and whistles that are officially referred to as "game operations" by the people who run modern day basketball arenas and modern day basketball franchises.

I'm talking the music, the flashing lights, the scoreboard ordering you around. The tricycle races during timeouts. The computer animated NASCAR races during time outs. The freakin' Kiss Me Cam.

And when I say my friend hates -- absolutely loathes -- this, I don't mean that it makes him grumpy. It kind of makes him itchy, and irritable and he sends these really wonderful and wordy e-mails describing his feelings.

I find it all kind of ... silly.

Last night, the Blazers mascot, a cat cleverly named Blaze, went running around with a red flag that said "Noise!" in white letters. Someone had to order that sign. They had to find the flag maker, pick a font, pick a size, and it had to be a size a guy in a big fury costume could handle. Then they had to place the order.

Many, many years from now, perhaps even hundreds of years, there will be a T-shirt cannon in a museum, and a man enjoying his retirement by giving tours of that museum will stop in front of it.

"According to archeologists, thousands of people would stand and cheer for the man who held this cannon. They would yell and wave their arms and jump up and down in front of seats some paid hundreds of dollars for."

"You mean they wanted to be shot?" a child will say.

"Yes, they did."

"With what?" another child will say.

"T-shirts," the retired tour guide will say. "T-shirts that cost probably less than $2 to make. Let's move on."

And there will be no good way to explain Blaze's behavior last night when he came out for his nightly early fourth-quarter dunk competition. After his first dunk, he stripped down to a Superman costume and did another dunk.

In other words, exactly four days after Dwight Howard did that in the dunk contest, Blaze did the ... exact ... same ... thing. And no one booed. People should have booed him off the court and slapped him with a plagiarism charge.

None of this will make happier the gentleman from Tennessee who left Peter Ames Carlin a voice mail this morning wanting to know what's wrong with the Blazers. Aside from asking a sports-deaf television columnist about this, the gentleman asked in a way that made it sound like it was meant for a YouTube debate. It was actually kind of sweet. He just wants his Blazers to "win 'em all."